Bio as Bible: Managers Imitate Steve Jobs

Prasad Thammineni, the chief executive of a file-sharing start-up called OfficeDrop in Cambridge, Mass., was no fan of Steve Jobs after Apple Inc.AAPL-0.87% took a long time adding one of the company's apps to its iTunes Store.

Since the publication of Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography, some executives have read the book as a management bible, Leslie Kwoh reports on digits. Photo: AP.

But as he read the hefty biography "Steve Jobs," the 42-year-old Mr. Thammineni found himself buying into many of the Apple co-founder's management ideas. He even emailed screenshots of some of the book's passages to his 20 employees with such messages as "We should all work to achieve this" and "Amazing! Applicable to any start-up."

Mr. Thammineni isn't the only executive who has read the biography as a how-to manual. Since Walter Isaacson's portrait was published shortly after Mr. Jobs's death last October at the age of 56, some executives have treated it as a sort of management bible, raiding it for nuggets of inspiration.

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Steve Jobs's biography has become a 'guide' for managers.
European Pressphoto Agency

Mimicking Mr. Jobs's keynote style and adopting catch phrases like "one more thing"—the words Mr. Jobs often used to introduce products—may make bosses think they're operating more like the genius himself. But it has provoked plenty of eye-rolling among staffers.

"It's not to that point of being annoying yet, but it might get there," says Dominique Levin, vice president of marketing at Totango Inc., a software company based in Mountain View, Calif., and Tel Aviv. Her boss, CEO Guy Nirpaz, devoured all 656 pages of the book in three days, then bought copies for his employees—including Hebrew translations for employees in Israel—so they could discuss the book at company meetings.

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"When they read it, they'll see that you can do things differently, be more product focused," says Mr. Nirpaz, 39 years old, whose company builds software that monitors customer relations. He also hopes employees will take a softer view of their own boss after reading the book, which portrays Mr. Jobs as a brilliant but mercurial leader.

"I'm a good guy, but I'm very demanding," says Mr. Nirpaz. Once his employees have read the book, he adds, "they'll see I'm a very nice manager compared to Steve Jobs."

Mr. Isaacson, who wrote "Steve Jobs" with Mr. Jobs's permission and cooperation, says he has had numerous inquiries from executives and M.B.A. students eager to glean management tips.

While he agrees that his subject was a singular force in business, he's puzzled by those who believe that imitation will conjure success. "I hate when people say, 'I'm like Steve Jobs, I drive people to perfection,'" Mr. Isaacson says. "I say, well, make sure you have his talents as well."

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

At Vector Marketing Canada, the Canadian sales arm of Cutco Cutlery, Mr. Jobs's example has inspired executives to simplify communication. Sales-support staff members used to flood managers' in-boxes with alerts, but they were recently instructed to group their topics into a maximum of three emails a day, says Joe Cardillo, the company's national sales manager.

Mr. Cardillo bought copies of a previous book, "The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs" by Carmine Gallo for his 10 senior employees. Motivated by the section on "mastering the message," an in-house production team recently produced an eight-minute online video about the company's history, he says.

Not everyone is amused. Ben Bleikamp, a designer at GitHub, a San Francisco software company, was so annoyed by CEOs trying to act like Mr. Jobs that he wrote a rant on his blog last summer. "There seems to be this disturbing trend among start-up CEOs to not only admire Steve Jobs and his success but to try to actually act like Steve Jobs," Mr. Bleikamp wrote.

"I've worked with people who have idolized Steve Jobs in an almost perverted way I guess," says Mr. Bleikamp, who is careful to stress that the blog wasn't about his current or prior employer. "People see a super-picky, design-focused guy and think if they emulate that they can do something similar."

Kurt Ling, 48, the CEO and co-founder of Pure LatexBliss, a Georgia-based mattress manufacturer, is such a fan he has adopted Mr. Jobs's signature turtlenecks.

"Steve said: 'To create is to connect,'" Mr Ling explains, later adding that the book convinced him that he also has a "reality distortion field"—a term often used to describe Mr. Jobs's magnetism and ability to push his teams to buy into his vision.

Joe Hunt, his details-oriented partner, says he usually agrees with the Apple approach, though perhaps not as enthusiastically.

Mr. Ling recently asked Mr. Hunt and an employee to reorganize the company's showroom to reflect the Apple-like style, but the two lined up the mattresses in rows instead of grouping them in clusters as Apple does with its products.

Mr. Ling arrived and disapproved. "That's not how Steve Jobs would do it," he said. "This does not look like an Apple store." And shortly afterward, the mattresses were rearranged.

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